The Gates of Babylon (23 page)

“This isn’t theft,” he said, sounding calmer. “You’ll be paid. Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed her wheelchair into the parking lot and had two men load her into the back of a government car. During the summer, in the early days of the USDA occupation, she’d seen that car driving up and down the valley every day, but lately, with the fuel shortages, it had sat for weeks at a stretch in front of the chapel without moving. They folded her wheelchair and put it in the truck. Before she could protest about her children, they brought the boys back outside. Daniel came around the other side and sat next to her and someone handed her Jake. He seemed none the worse for wear and was wearing one of the men’s wristwatches on his arm above the elbow. The soldier tousled the boy’s hair and then shut the door. Malloy got behind the wheel of the car.

“Could you get us a car seat for the baby?” she asked.

It was a feeble attempt to delay the inevitable, and the man turned and gave her a skeptical look.

“Sit still,” he said. “We’ll be leaving any minute.”

But it was at least ten minutes before the last grain truck pulled onto the street, and by then Malloy had already made two calls and waved over his guards to check progress. The men were jumpy already, and their boss’s nerves didn’t seem to be helping. But at last they pulled away.

They rumbled straight down the road in a caravan led by the two army-style trucks and the armed guards. Next came the five grain trucks, together holding what she estimated was 150 tons of their precious wheat. Finally, Chip Malloy and his three unwilling passengers in the car.

“Why are we in the back?” she asked.

“This is an unarmored car. If there’s any trouble, the soldiers can handle it.”

“Don’t ambushes usually come from behind?”

He glanced in the rearview mirror, but it was dark and she had to imagine his annoyed expression. “Please be quiet, Mrs. Christianson. You’re making a stressful situation worse.”

The way they were creeping through the center of town as such an inviting target, he might soon discover exactly what a stressful situation looked like. If Elder Smoot was out there rounding up men with firearms, they might not even make it to the highway before the entire caravan came under fire.

A sick feeling settled into Fernie’s stomach. She quietly unclipped Daniel’s seatbelt and scooted as close to the middle of the car as possible, with her boys practically on her lap.

“What are you doing back there?” he asked. “If you throw yourself out—”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I’m paralyzed and I have two children. When the shooting starts—” She stopped and looked at
Daniel, trying to think of a better way to put it. “—
if
we take gunfire, I’m pushing them to the floor and covering them with my body.”

“Is that what you’re expecting?” he asked, tone sharp. “Do you know something?”

She didn’t answer. They would come on horse, she thought.

But Fernie looked in vain for riders as they left the center of Blister Creek and turned north. She waited for the gunfire to come at them from the last few houses on the north edge of town, for men to sweep in from the desert. But nothing happened.

Minutes later, midway to the Ghost Cliffs, they approached the spot where Fernie’s car had gone off the road fifteen months earlier, when she was pregnant with Jake. Where she’d suffered her broken back that left her paralyzed. The irrigation canal where the car had rolled would be a good place for an ambush. But again, nothing. Ahead, then. At the base of the cliffs.

“I asked you a question,” Malloy said, interrupting her thoughts.

“What question?”

“Are you expecting an ambush?”

“Mr. Malloy, do you know what you’re doing?”

“What do you think?”

“You don’t, do you? If you did, you wouldn’t be coming out here at night.”

“What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I never asked for this. My job was weighing cattle and analyzing the health of BLM grazing lands. Do you think I want to be here? Hell, no. I want to be home in Sacramento with my wife and kid.”

“Then why aren’t you?”

“Mrs. Christianson, if I run from my job—if
everyone
runs from
their jobs—what do you think is going to happen to this country?”

There was anguish in his tone and Fernie studied him with fresh sympathy. Malloy had been camping in their chapel for three months, his men strutting around town, padlocking grain silos, and snooping in cellars and barns, and when she’d thought about him at all she’d considered him a two-bit military dictator. It had never occurred to her that he had no desire to hold the position. That he had a family. That he was terrified.

“I took a call,” he continued. “They told me to load the trucks and drive to Green River. That’s what I’ll do. And now you’re telling me someone might try to kill me on the way.”

“If someone tries to stop us,” she said, “don’t shoot your way through. People will die.”

“I have my orders. I have to get the grain out.”

“And you might not have enough men, not if they’re prepared.”

“Who is it?” he asked. “What do you know?”

“Nothing, I promise. But you know what happened here before. You know what Blister Creek will do when pushed to the edge. Earlier this evening, some of the men were… stirring. And my husband isn’t here to calm the hotheads. That’s why I’m afraid.”

They hit the switchbacks that led into the Ghost Cliffs. The grain trucks ahead of them, with their heavy loads, slowed to a crawl in low gear, and at one point Fernie leaned forward to see that they’d nudged down to eight miles per hour. Malloy drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and muttered curses loud enough for her children to hear.

Here,
she thought.
This is where it comes.

But they kept climbing and climbing, until they emerged next to the reservoir. It finally occurred to her that they might escape without incident.

“That was easy,” she said.

“Looks like your sect leaders kept their heads.” Malloy sounded relieved, almost giddy. “Good for them.”

But Fernie remembered Elder Smoot at dinner. Willing to take both Jacob’s wife and his favorite sister hostage. It was a terrible risk. One he wouldn’t have taken it if he wasn’t trying to hide something even riskier.

So what was it?

CHAPTER TWENTY

Searchlights caught the governor’s helicopter as it swept over the outskirts of the Green River Federal Refugee Center. The pilot cast his own light downward as he searched for a place to land.

Below, a sea of green tents spread across the desert in orderly rows, punctuated here and there by larger white tents marked by red crosses. Sprouting closer to the old town of Green River sat a shantytown of plywood and corrugated metal that crowded along narrow alleys. Cook fires glowed by the hundreds in the open air, filling the sky with a haze that turned the lights from the helicopter into a physical, shimmering thing thrusting back and forth.

“This is America?” Jim said, more to himself than to the pilot on his left.

“Hell of a sight, ain’t it?” the pilot said. They wore headphones equipped with microphones so they could be heard over the rotors.
The pilot was a young guy named Rockwell, back from the Gulf with a plate in his head courtesy of an Iranian mortar round. “You are looking at the fifth largest city in the state of Utah. And wait until the Vegas evacuation gets into full swing, then you’ll see some numbers.”

Rockwell had done this run before and shortly found the cement landing pad at the army bunker near the new rail depot. Hundreds of faces looked up at them outside the bunker’s enclosure, hands shielding eyes against the light. Rockwell brought it down, killed the engine, and the rotor slowed with a whirr.

The two men climbed out of the helicopter into the cool night air. People surrounded the base, looking through the fence at the newcomers. Women, men, children. Dirty, thin, and cold.

“These people can’t spend the winter here,” Jim said.

“Better here than Salt Lake,” Rockwell said.

Jim’s brother had answered in much the same way when dropping the governor off at the airport at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, now mostly given over to military flights. When Jim asked why not move the camp somewhere warm, like Texas or southern Arizona instead of the middle of the godforsaken Colorado Plateau, Parley told him to think of it as an opportunity.

Sure, Jim thought, looking at the faces staring back through the fence. An opportunity for lawlessness, riots, and disease. An opportunity and excuse for the Feds to impose a military regime on the entire state.

Parley would say that was exactly the point. Utahns would be terrified of the massive camp on their doorstep. Afraid of the refugees, afraid the people of Salt Lake and Provo would be next.
Jim could protect them, feed them. They’d give him anything he wanted.

“They say the camp is moving to Denver in the spring,” Rockwell said as he grabbed his bag from the seat and shut the door.

“I don’t believe that. Do you?”

“Why not?”

“Never mind.”

Jim waved the pilot off toward the barracks then scanned the crowd of soldiers in combat fatigues who milled near the gates, around the trailers and cinderblock huts that served as military barracks, or up by the train station. Where the devil was General Lacroix, anyway?

Even as he thought this, the door swung open on the nearest of the buildings, a doublewide trailer near the fence. Lacroix came out, pulling on and buttoning a jacket over his short-sleeved khaki. Men snapped to attention and saluted. He stepped toward them with a young adjutant at his shoulder. Jim met the general halfway across the packed earth from the helipad.

“Has Malloy left Blister Creek yet?” Lacroix asked.

“Better have,” Jim said. “I gave him the grain trucks and sent him official orders from the Department of Agriculture.”

Lacroix raised an eyebrow. “How did you manage that?”

“You’ll have to ask my brother. He arranges that sort of thing. Some sort of contact in the USDA.”

“Naturally. The place is a nest of spies and traitors.”

“We don’t deal with traitors,” Jim said, irritated by the insinuation.

“No? We’ll see.” Lacroix turned to his lieutenant. “Get me Jones and Inez. I want an escort.”

As the young man hustled off toward the trailers, a train whistled. Moments later, it huffed into the station, screeched to a stop, and disgorged dozens of fresh refugees on the other side of the fence. They held suitcases and duffel bags and looked bewildered as soldiers pushed them away from the gates of the base.

“Unfortunately, the road depot and warehouse are on the other side of the camp,” Lacroix said, “so we’ll have to venture through the cesspool.”

“And that’s where Malloy is delivering the grain?”

“He’s sure as hell not dumping it here.”

Jones and Inez were two stiff, grim-faced staff officers, armed with M6s and wearing Kevlar vests, plus sidearms and what looked like Tasers. Each man was as tall as the thin-faced Lacroix himself, but more powerfully built.

Together with the general and his lieutenant, they walked through the double gates that led from the base, through sandbag bunkers, and to a pair of waiting Jeeps driven by a pair of staff sergeants. With the group now numbering seven, Jim felt more comfortable about his safety.

A bulldozed dirt road bisected the camp between two rows of tents that sat shoulder to shoulder. People looked up from cookfires or stuck their heads out of tents to stare as the Jeeps approached. A thin, middle-aged man with a buzzed head who was wrapped in a blanket, looking for all the world like a concentration camp survivor, shouted something at them when they passed, but Jim didn’t pick it up. Others muttered or stood sullenly with hands on hips.

Jim took it all in. “Security looks… lax.”

“It’s terrible,” Lacroix admitted. “But we don’t have enough
diesel to run the tractors, and we’re short on fencing, barbed wire—you name it. And they keep dumping refugees. About five hundred a day at the moment. Stupid, hungry people. Bunch of animals.”

The tent city continued for block after block, broken here and there by semipermanent clusters of trailers and motor homes, often ringed with shacks made of plywood and sheet metal. They didn’t enter the filthy, dangerous-looking shantytown Jim had spotted from the air, and he was grateful for that.

Huge lines formed wherever there were services—whether they were porta-potties, medical tents, or food centers. The bigger lines grew so large as to clog the road itself. Lacroix’s men honked and shouted and edged forward until they’d muscled through.

The general said they were on their way to an army-run supply depot, but before they arrived, they drove into the middle of a protest. It looked at first like another food line, and they were in the midst of it before Jim sensed the pulsing anger from the crowd. Unlike most of the camp, which seemed to have segregated along social and ethnic lines, even down to a group of Navajo in campers the Jeeps had passed moments earlier, this was an equal opportunity expression of rage. Whites with ponytails protested next to darker-skinned people carrying signs in Spanish, and others who looked like ranchers and farmers from the Southwest, people with tattoos, and even two elderly men in dirty jackets and fez caps with signs reading
SHRINERS AGAINST FASCISM
.

The crowd stared at them with hostile expressions, and no amount of honking or yelling could move them out of the way.

The general picked up the radio and called the other Jeep. “Clear the road.”

Inez and Jones jumped out of the other vehicle and pushed through the crowd with their rifle butts. It parted with grunts and protests and sullen stares. Lacroix rolled down the window and the noise swelled in volume.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Jim said.

A man holding a handmade sign that read
BREAD NOT BULLETS
in block letters, artfully drawn to look as though they’d been perforated with bullet holes, glared at them as the vehicles forced their way through. Tattoos climbed his neck, and he had piercings in his nose, eyebrows, and cheek, together with plugs in his earlobes.